New animated series from Australian creator Millie Holten and producer Nicolas Colla follows the exploits of a damaged, sad hunter trying to bag elusive and often mythological big game before his rival does.
Adult Swim has just dropped their latest SMALLS animated short, , the first in a series from Australian creator Millie Holten and producer Nicolas Colla of LateNite Films.SMALLS features short form animated releases by up-and-coming creators from around the world, with new shorts released weekly on Adult Swim’s YouTube.
Actually, the series has a rather lengthy title: .In the series, legendary poacher Munch Rexford is trying to bag elusive and often mythological big game before his rival does.Hijinks ensue.
For Holten, a writer, performer, and 10-year improv comedy veteran with a passion for “grotty comedy,” exploring incredible legendary creatures from the lens of someone who wants them dead felt “super-rich.” “Plus,” she notes, “the extra challenge of making that person a protagonist you want to follow was also really enticing.Making Munch clearly damaged and traumatized ended up being the way in.Bad people are sad people.
I made a mini-Bible, drew some art, and brought the idea to Nick at LateNite.It’s a morbid concept, but he immediately got what I was going for.” You can watch the first episode, “Holy Lion,” below; “White Whale” debuts Friday, March 14.According to Colla, took around three months to produce.
“Millie's incredible art style is at the heart of it, and she has such a specific tone to her comedy that she did a lot of the heavy lifting early on, setting up the look of the show as well as working with the Adult Swim team to make sure the scripts and animatics were really landing,” he shares. “From there we brought on a couple of designers to help with the design workload and then we had Dale Anderson, a longtime collaborator of Millie leading the animation.” Holten started drawing cartoons during Melbourne’s COVID lockdowns, so most of her design style and choices are born out of limitations.“For example, I’ve never been able to draw noses, so they are just blobs,” she reveals.“The longer I’ve worked, the more I’ve carved out a somewhat grimy, hand-drawn aesthetic – bags under the eyes, lots of texture lines, and a murkier brown-ish color palette.
My work started in simple 10-panel cartoons, so it’s been a fun challenge to push into more complex frames and backgrounds.” Colla acknowledges the project was quite challenging and that working within your limitations is always tricky, especially when trying to pull off something relatively ambitious with a small team.“These first two episodes had many complex backgrounds without a whole lot of time to do them, so we had to be clever about where we could get away with a plain color or gradient to help ease the workload,” he says.“We also had a lot of back and forth over how we introduced Miriam, one our lead characters, in Episode 2 – ‘White Whale.’” “Originally, we didn't have a whole lot of context so coming to it cold without having seen the first episode, might’ve been a bit confusing,” he continues.
“Extremely late in the production process - I think we'd largely been picture locked - we threw in an alt voice over and a small additional scene to help give the audience more context.It was a bit stressful but gave us a much smoother introduction to Miriam and her relationship with Munch.So, I’m glad we did it.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
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